


Act of Mercy

by squeakylids



Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M, I'm Bad At Tagging, Major Character Injury, Medical Procedures, Tags May Change, Vampire Medic, Vampires, Warnings May Change
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-23
Updated: 2017-10-23
Packaged: 2019-01-21 19:59:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12464820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/squeakylids/pseuds/squeakylids
Summary: Would she stay, risking possible death and decapitation, or would she run, forsaking the job she had been doing for as long as she could remember?





	1. Discovery

**Author's Note:**

> I have writer's block, so my husband gave me a prompt: 
> 
> What about a Vampire from like WWI or WWII who was a medic or a soldier because they couldn't die? 
> 
> This is my attempt to flesh that idea out a little.

Elise had fallen in with a bad crowd when we'd gone to Montana, but then again... that had always been her damned problem. It was one of the many reasons we had left South America and her little group that had sprung up in Rio, Brazil, while I had been away in the jungle.

Unfortunately for her, this time it proved to be fatal.

Hay colored hair was tangled with wood splinters and straw as it pooled against the bloodsoaked earth beneath her. The smell of blood and soil was slightly overpowering, the rich earth and iron tang. Eyelashes of a similar hue framed orbs gone milky with death, the texture not quite correctly wet anymore as she no longer produced tears. Her eyes had once been the color of cornflowers, oddly bright and captivating. Her skin, which had always been milky, now carried a pallor I knew all too intimately, tinted unnaturally grey. Lips, a perfectly pouted cupid's bow, were pale and slack, her jaw no longer carrying any tension. She had, at the very least, managed to not suffer the indignity of a protruding tongue as she lay there slack-jawed, but the razor needles of teeth that were exposed left no illusions about her apparent humanity. Or, obvious lack thereof.

As I squatted on the packed earthen floor of the old barn by my friends severed head I let out a weary sigh. This is what I had feared for so long. When she had told me that she had found others like us, I had warned her to be cautious. We had met others like us before, and they had always been walking a path that I refused to be a part of. Elise had always been more... amenable to that aspect of that we were, but I had always warned her that following that part of our nature would get her killed. She'd brushed off my warnings, telling me that after more than one hundred years she could handle herself. Then she had started hanging out with this new group and their leader in his nest and one thing had led to another and now...

Now she was a severed blond head with cloudy blue eyes and a pool of blood on the floor. Fan-freaking-tastic. We might have grown apart, but it hadn't meant I'd ever wished this on her, we had been family.

Damnit, now I was truly alone.

A breeze moved through the barn, and the smell of fresh blood hit me like a rocket to the face, making my mouth involuntarily water. I sniffed the air and paused, stretching my heightened senses to see if I could find the source, cocking my head when I heard it. Shallow, bubbling, wet breaths and a weak pulse, in combination with the strong scent of blood, spoke of grievous injury. Swearing profusely I pushed myself to my feet, searching for the wounded human. Whoever had come in and wiped out this nest had left behind the bloodsucker's victim to apparently die. Great, this was just what I needed.

When I found him I realized a few things, and none of them really boded well for me.

First of all, the unconscious lanky frame I had discovered wasn't some random victim these bloodsuckers had dragged back to the nest to feed on. This guy was a Hunter, there was no mistaking it, and I was willing to bet a fair amount of the bodies on the ground were due to his hand. It was almost as if every one of them I had run across since about 1973 had some rule about having to wear flannel to be in the club or something. All of them tended to look like the kinds of people you would find in a roadside bar, and there were generally two types in the life; those that were in the "family business" and those that were in it for some kind of revenge.

Second, he had not come to this place alone, but also not in force. One more hunter had been here with him, and I had probably just missed him as he had most likely dashed off for help. There was another flannel shirt, color overtaken by red, bunched against the right side of his chest where someone had obviously been pressing it. The thing that struck me the most though was a large bloody handprint was smeared against the unconscious man's stubbled jaw. When you have seen as many battlefields as I have, you know that handprint. It is the handprint of someone desperately forcing another to look at them while they say things like, "Don't give up," or "You're gonna make it," even when they don't believe it themselves.

Third, he was dying right there in front of me.

I could hear it with every breath he took, every beat of his heart. He had a complete hemopneumothorax on his right side and his left was not doing nearly enough to compensate. He was going to drown in his own blood if he didn't get help within the next few moments. His pulse was flagging as I was listening, his heartbeat announcing his ebbing life force with every thump. I had a choice to make; run and save my myself, or stay and save him. One would cost his life, the other might cost mine.

From where he was propped against the barn wall I watched his body react to a wave of pain. His mind was fighting the pull of unconsciousness, but it was a losing battle. The sweat-dampened brow wrinkled, bringing sandy eyebrows together in an unintentionally pinched expression as a small whimper escaped him, sweat beading on the gray pallor of his lightly freckled face. His full mouth, pink with an alarming blue hue, grimaced again as another noise escaped him, his face blanching white to make his freckles stand out in sharp relief. It was a distinct noise, one I had heard too many times before, and the freckles made him look young, so very young, like so many soldiers before him. My survival instincts were screaming at me to run, that I needed to save myself. Did self-preservation win out? Hell no. Every fiber of my being stayed rooted right where I was, my hand wrapped around the worn strap of my field kit because this soldier was dying and I had a job to do.

Goddamnit.


	2. The race

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam walks in on something he did not expect.

Minutes later the rumble of an engine announced that we were no longer alone, but I didn't bother to stop my work as I fought against time to save the man clinging to life laid out on the wooden slats before me. If I stopped there was a very good chance that the man beneath my hands would die. As a matter of fact, I was willing to bet that it was nothing more than stubborn tenacity that was keeping him alive at this point. One of the vamps had apparently attempted to put a fist through part of his chest and had pretty much succeeded, at least on an internal level. When I had pulled the shirt out of the way of the wound and actually seen the extent of what I was dealing with the race against the reaper had been on.

My workstation was not ideal. The tall man was laid out on a picnic table that the vamps had been using, his long legs dangling awkwardly off one end as he lay shirtless and bloody against the bare wood. The medkit I carried was good for basic severe emergencies, but I wasn't really prepared for full field surgery. I hadn't honestly needed to be prepared for full field surgery since Viet Nam, and that was a war I wasn't honestly over yet, but at least this was not something new I had to deal with. I had patched up far worse with far less before. I just needed to get him stable. If I could stabilize him his chances of survival went up astronomically.

The pressure bandage looked bulky from where it was swathed against the hole in his chest wall, but it was holding. Not looking up as I pushed the set of clamps into the incision I had made in the fifth intercostal space on his side, I spoke out into the quiet.

"If you pull that trigger I will stop what I am doing and let him die."

I could feel the big body in the doorway tense from across the room, his pulse thundering as adrenaline drenched him. Distinctly, I heard the sound of the hammer of the nineteen-eleven his hand was tensing around locking into place. The smell of gunpowder and cleaning oil assaulted my nose too as he continued to hold the gun on me, not that a bullet would do much good. He probably figured that out when he noticed I was sucking blood through an IV tube like a girl in a poodle skirt sucking down a malt. The moment he noticed it fear spiced the air and both his breathing and his pulse took on a strained quality. He needed to knock that adrenaline kick off though if I was going to bleed him though because HE was a blood type match for the man on the table.

It must have made for an interesting scene, one of my kind feeding on a blood pack while working feverishly to save the life of one of his kind. The hunter probably didn't know what the hell to think. It was probably not a common sight; me sucking down on the medical packet like a juice box instead of taking advantage of the injured feast of his companion. The fact that I was fixing him instead of letting bleed out, that I hadn't killed him outright when I had come upon him injured and alone, probably went against everything this guy had ever been told about vampires. The whole scene was probably making him second guess a few things. Quite the conundrum for him I imagined.

It would be a bold faced lie to say that I hadn't been tempted to feed on the injured man though, but that was just a part of my nature. Thus the blood packs instead of my fangs in his throat. The blood packs weren't going to do the man on the table in front of me any good anyway; wrong blood type. Besides, I needed the snack, it helped me work on cases like this.

"He has a collapsed lung," I explained as I worked, using another clamp to feed the small bit of IV tubing I had cut into the incision, securing it with practiced ease, satisfied when I saw the flash of blood fill the tube before turning my attention to other immediate matters. "One of his broken ribs ripped a hole right through it. I need to release the pressure and I need to try to get the lung to re-inflate."

His clothing rustled as the gun lowered, the man still unsure of how to react. I kept working, pretending that I wasn't standing off with a hunter who was probably going to try and cut my head off the moment he got the chance. He wouldn't be the first if it happened, and probably wouldn't be the last. That was a problem I could deal with later, right now I had a dying man to save.

"I need to decompress his chest, I promise I'm not hurting him any further," I explained as I grabbed a long needle from my bag and immediately pressed my fingers a couple of inches below his clavicle, looking for the intercostal space at the top of his lung cavity, "once I get him stabilized you can get him to a hospital for surgery."

"Why are you helping him?" The man finally asked, his voice careful.

Not answering for a second, I concentrated on the issue before me. Ripping off the finger of my glove and putting it on the needle to act as a one-way valve, I then jabbed the needle through the muscle of his pectoral.

The hiss of escaping air as pressure was suddenly released was music to my ears and a little sigh of relief escaped me as I heard his breathing ease a fraction. With that, I finally cast a glance up at the tall man who was eyeing me with the utmost suspicion, not that I blamed him. I didn't even look as I secured the impromptu one-way valve.

"Believe it or not, not all of us are like them."

I jerked my head towards the headless corpses that littered the floor for emphasis.

His expression was carefully guarded as he weighed the information laid out before him. It gave me a chance to examine him in all his hazel-eyed shaggy-haired glory, and while his bone structure was sharper, there was no mistaking the basic genetic similarity between him and the man laid out on my table. Ah, so brothers then.

Perfect. Even less chance of a negative reaction to a transfusion.

"Don't get me wrong, most of us are more than happy to fit you with a wooden overcoat though." I turned away from him to grab the rest of the IV tubing, glancing at him again before turning to my patient. "but as unorthodox as I may appear I can promise you I've been working meat factories for over a hundred years now, so if anyone can stabilize your brother, it's me."

I hadn't had to digitally intubate someone since... well... probably before the guy who's mouth I was about to violate had been born.

Ignoring the distressed sound heard from across the barn I pried open the unconscious man's jaw and thrust my bloody fingers inside his mouth. His gag reflex was weak in his state, but I needed to work fast anyway to keep from stressing his system any further. It was like riding a bike. My fingers slipped to the back of his throat and instantly felt the epiglottis, pushing it out of the way with a practiced twitch of my finger so I could slip the small tube through his vocal chords.

Pulling my fingers out of his mouth I held the tubing firmly in place as I kept his jaw open to help ease his breathing. Replacing my snack straw with the cut IV tubing that was strategically placed in his trachea, I gently assisted respirations. As I listened for air movement, my eyes were glued on the right side of his chest, hoping my plan would work. Silence reigned throughout the room as the man in the doorway watched what was happening in disbelief, or hope, or something. I didn't dare take my eyes off the patient before me because it was his strength that would save him now to look. All I could do was assist.

The wet sounds in his chest were promising, and while he still looked like death he was starting to look slightly less cyanotic. I might have beaten the reaper once more, but it was still way too soon to tell.

When I looked back over at the tall man his gun was gone, and the distance seemed more to give me room to work than to actually keep a defensive space up. His expression was concerned and earnest, no trace of wariness there anymore at all. Apparently, in the few minutes he had been watching me, I had earned his trust somehow. Interesting.

"Is he going to be ok?" The question was quiet and full of gravity. Ah. So he was also fairly aware of just how bad his brother had been hurt too.

"He's strong. He wants to live," I told him, giving him a carefully worded non-answer that I had given countless times before, "and that's half the battle. I'd feel better if we got some blood back in him before you try and move him to get him stable, he's still dicey right now. You're a match if you're willing."

He blinked at me, looking a little taken aback.

"How can you..."

I tapped my nose. "I can smell it." I looked back down at the man on the table, noticing that there was actual movement on the right side of his chest now, thank god. "Just like I can hear both your breathing and your heartbeats. Same as I can smell that you're related. Comes in really handy for things like this."

He stared at me, hard, for just a moment, before he moved forward, shrugging out of the jacket he was wearing to expose one long tanned arm. This time it was I who was slightly taken aback at the apparent behemoth literally loomed over me with an intense earnest expression on his face. I had thought the kid on the table was big, but damned. What the hell did their parents feed them growing up? Wheaties? Gamma Radiation?

"What do you need me to do?" He demanded.   
  
"Just hold out your arm Tarzan, I'll do the dirty work." 


	3. breaking the ice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam finally asks the burning question; Why?

"So... you're a doctor?"

The question broke the tense silence that had settled after I had put him down on the bench next to his brother's still form and shoved a needle in his arm, explaining that I needed to try and get some fluids into the man fading on the table. Nodding in agreement to my desire to stabilize the wounded man a bit, he hadn't even flinched at my not-so-gentle stick. He had watched me, unabashedly curious, as I went through movements as familiar as breathing to me setting up everything I needed to do my job.

We had been sitting in reserve for a while by then, a simple mason jar vacuum pump system working between the brothers to drain one and feed the other. I had told him that the stronger we could get the unconscious man, the better his chances would be, considering I doubted he wanted to call an ambulance to a scene so liberally littered with decapitated corpses. He had agreed without argument, grateful I think that his brother had made it even this far. I hadn't been kidding with the placation; his brother was strong and he had a ferocious will to survive, he just couldn't do it alone.

"That's a... interesting question. The official answer is no, I am not in any legal sense a Doctor. I have never gone to an official medical school long enough to graduate and have no official medical degrees or certifications in my name." I answered as I double checked the flow of blood and then paused to listen to vitals. Everything was sounding stronger. Good. "I have, however, been stitching up guys like you in one form or another since 1914, so I'd like to think I'm at least qualified."

"I don't... you..." he trailed off, "what did you mean when you said you're not like the others?" He finally demanded after the hush had fallen again.

Raising a questioning eyebrow I looked at him, "Are you actually asking a monster like me for my life story? That's very... un-hunter-like of you." I stood up and crossed my arms over my chest, looking directly in his eyes even though he was sitting and I was standing. Woof, what a freaking giant. "What if I tell you something that makes you sympathetic towards me? What if I make you not want to do your job?"

"You saved my brother." He stated.

"I'm trying to anyway, yes. So?"

" _Why_?"

I sighed. Cest la vie. "Because it's what I do. It's what I've always done. It's how I became this," I motioned to myself, "in the first place. Do you honestly have any idea how useful someone like me is in a war?"

He blinked at me.

As I spoke I ticked off my list on my fingers. "I am immortal, at least so far. I am incredibly strong. I have superior senses. I cannot be affected by poison gas or bullets or disease.

"This gift has been a boon, not only for my work but for the men who have benefited from my gifts. Gifts that have men like you label me as a monster because you cannot see the difference between someone like me, and them."

Jerking my head to the bodies that lay around us for emphasis, I continued, "I have always found it ironically humorous that men like you label things like me monster without bothering to try to know us, and yet do nothing to curb the horrors of your own kind. You'll kill a nest for feeding, but leave behind a human who's done worse. You pretend to be heroes when you are nothing more than flannel wrapped racists who see only what they want to. That does not, however, change what I do or who I am. I became this way because I was trying to help people, and I will continue to try and help people. You wouldn't be the first who have wished me ill despite my assistance."

"I'm not... going to attack you." He finally said, probably a little wary of my tone and the statements I had made.

I snorted. "Well, thank goodness we got that cleared up."

"My name is Sam." he offered after a bit, and then glanced at the still body. "That's Dean."

"Nice to meet you. My name is Merci."

"Merci... the medic?" His voice was very careful.

"Yeah, and believe me, I've heard every joke you can think of in more languages than you could ever hope to learn to speak," I smirked at him when he made a particularly humorous bitch face. "I've been doing this since World War One with the same name kid, trust me, I have heard _every_  joke."


	4. the tale

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He asked for a life story...

"Where did you learn to make that setup?" Sam asked as he looked at the simple vacuum pump I had jury-rigged out of old jars I found around the place. He kept squeezing his fist rhythmically as I had instructed him, watching the jar slowly fill from the tube leading to his arm. It was a rough setup, but still serviceable.

"Albert taught me in 1915. He was a pioneer in the field of blood work. A proper profession for the professional vampire, no?"

"Wait... seriously? You weren't exaggerating that?"

"I have pretty much been in every single major global conflict since the Great War, so no, not exaggerating." I sighed and settled in on the other bench where I could keep my eye on the patient.

Fuck it, why not? We had at least twenty minutes to kill before I was willing to risk trying to move Dean, and he had asked, and it wasn't like I really got to tell anyone else about my life.

"I grew up in a little village outside of the Ardennes forest in North Eastern France, born in the winter of 1896. Your education system in America sucks, but what you need to know is that the trenches from the war front ended at the edge of the Ardennes. I'll never forget it because the Great War started there. August 21st, 1914. It was one of the major "frontier" battles. It was the start of the rest of my life."

"You were actually in France, during world war one?" Sam's voice was full of disbelief.

Grinning I pulled down the collar of my shirt to reveal a scar on my left clavicle. "I was herding sheep when I was hit by a stray bullet. They took me to the local church at La Main de Massiges where a Belgian doctor and his sister were tending the sudden flood of wounded. That was where I met Albert and Elise Hustin." I looked pointedly at her blond head on the floor.

Sam flinched, a guilty look crossing his features. "Sorry, they were..."

"Attacking people. I know. I warned her." I sighed, "I don't blame either of you for her death either, she knew what she was doing. And to be fair, they almost killed your brother."

"You're not upset?"

"I didn't wish her dead, by any means, but since we lost Albert... well it was never the same." I shrugged, looking away from the corpse of my one time friend. "Albert was killed at the end of World War Two. They say decapitation is the only way to kill a vampire, but it turns out that an explosive round from a mortar will do just as well." Swallowing hard I found myself reaching for the chain I kept around my neck, fiddling with the pair of gold bands I kept there. "I found his glasses, his notepad, his hand with his wedding ring and watch, and a shoe. There was nothing else left of him. It had been a direct hit on our little hospital. Elise and I drifted apart after we lost Abert. I wanted to keep on going with our work, and obviously, Elise didn't."

He was watching me play with the gold bands, and he read between the lines.

"How did you become a vampire who helps people?" he ventured.

I flashed a smile at him, but I knew it was a little sad. Smiles tended to be when one was reminiscing. "After I had been shot, I wanted to work with Albert. I was inspired by his compassion and brilliance and his single-minded dedication to helping people. He was the kindest, warmest, gentlest man I had ever met. I was a simple illiterate farm girl, but he made me want to be more. He made me want to help people. So I started working with him and his sister in the church, tending the wounded. I fell madly in love with him and was willing to follow him anywhere he ever went.

"It all happened in a small village near the front in 1916. We had been working on the victims of the latest skirmish when the wind had abruptly shifted and blown a huge cloud of toxic gas into the town. I was dying, gasping for breath as I lay on the floor of that small church looking up at a statue of the Virgin Mary when Albert had saved me, turning me into what he and his sister were, something I had begun to suspect but couldn't prove. I can still remember him begging me for permission in that toxic air as he had wept.

"Apparently, he had fallen in love with me as well and didn't want me to die. With his help, I was able to master my new abilities and put them to good use, as he had. I have never killed anyone out of some uncontrolled bloodlust. That's what blood packs are for, and there is always plenty of unused blood of certain types about to expire in the field that no one will miss."

"But you have killed people." Sam had a carefully neutral expression, but there was a slight self-sanctimonious tone to his voice.

I narrowed my eyes at him. "And your hands are completely bloodless, Hunter? At least I can claim that I have never killed someone who didn't deserve it, can you honestly claim the same for both my kind _and_  yours? Humans are bastard filled bastards with bastard cream filling, for the most part, war taught me that. Monsters are the same, I didn't need anything more than my own nature to tell me that. You try and make me out to be less than you simply because I have more teeth and sharper senses, but things like Treblinka prove that humans are bigger monsters than you could ever hope we are. I have never lost a minute of sleep over any of it and I have saved scores more souls than I have taken, can you say the same?"

"That doesn't change the fact that you've killed people," he said seriously.

"Lots of people killed Nazis during the war. There is no possible way you can make me feel guilty for that."

He blinked again, apparently dumbfounded into speechlessness at that. Ha. Figured he didn't have a comeback for that one.

"At least in that war, it was easy to see who the enemy was. Vietnam was a fucking disaster, a war that could not be won by invaders from the beginning, and I was there ten years before America even got involved. It felt like I jumped from one conflict to another for a little while there; the Great War, and then the Russian Civil War, and then the Spanish Civil War which was followed shortly then by World War Two, rolling into the French War as it was known in Indochina, then Korea, then straight back to Vietnam with the Americans again. It was a complete nightmare. I saw nothing but war literally from 1914 all the way until 1975. I don't care who or what you are, working medical for that long in those conditions fucks with you."

I paused in my narrative, remembering, and shook my head to clear the cobwebs of memories. "Being French in Nam was pretty much like being a gay Jewish black guy at a KKK rally actively burning the American Flag too. They really hated us in the Northern part of Vietnam, which was where I worked for a while. I have been cursed in the most creative of fashions on more deathbeds than I care to ever recall.

"After Nam... I wandered around South America. I needed to find something completely alien to, well... everything. Hell, I still carry a K-Bar and my Zippo out of habit. South America was a chance to try to get my mind clear from all the war. Elise had stayed in Rio while I was in the jungle, drifting us apart even further than when she had been in America when I had been in-country. I just came back to civilization and I have to be honest, kinda wish I'd stayed in the Amazon. My kind is all but a myth due to men like you, and most seem to be acting like nothing more than the monsters from legend. It's been justifiably earning them fates like this," I looked pointedly at my friend's head again.

"When I come back, I find out about the Gulf War, and Desert Storm, and 9/11 and the fact that Indochina still hasn't gotten it's shit together... Russia is still being a bastard ever since Stalin, and I vividly remember the USSR during the 60's. Don't even get me started on the bullshit in Africa and the rest of the Middle East. If I had stayed in my clinic in the Amazon I wouldn't have to know about any of this shit or be questioning my place in the world. I could go back to pretending I wasn't fleeing all the civil unrest that was springing up in Venezuela, and the poverty in Brazil.

"Sometimes it all feels so... hopeless." I let out a little sigh and didn't look up as I checked Dean's vitals again.

"Wow, that's... I don't know what to say." Sam murmured into the quiet that had once again settled.  
  
I gave him a sad little smile, "Sometimes there's nothing to say. Things just are what they are. I want to give your brother a few more minutes before we try and move him, but then you need to fly. He needs emergency surgery if he's going to make a full recovery."

"But he has a chance?"

"His vitals are stronger than when I found him, and not all of my work seems to have been in vain, but moving him is probably going to cause him to start decompensating again. You're not going to have much time before he slides back past the point of saving; it was a close thing already." I told him honestly.

"But he has a chance." This time it wasn't a question, but a statement. I met his eyes, and there was the weight of true gratitude there and it was making me uncomfortable. "Thanks to you."

"Don't thank me. Your brother is by no means alright, and there is a chance he might not survive this."


End file.
